Yesterday, I wrote about urgent vs important and what it means for you as a developer.
There are many teams where everything seems urgent. Working there is a never-ending fire drill of new problems that need to be fixed as soon as possible.
When you’re receiving many urgent tasks, that’s a sign that somewhere else in the process something is broken.
One place the system might be broken is on the product/prioritization side. If your product team isn’t filtering requests, then they’re not doing their job. A product manager’s (or engineering manager's) job is prioritization, triage, and shielding the engineering team from requests.
Interrupting an engineer should be rare and reserved for high-value, high-urgency issues.
Another place your team might be struggling is on bugs & incidents. If requests are constantly coming in to fix existing code, then you won’t have the breathing room to work on new features.
Good testing practices, stronger QA, and a culture of observability + monitoring is critical to secure your application. Make yourself (and your team) confident in the code you’ve already shipped, so that incidents become increasingly rare.
There might be other places where the process is broken, but in 80% of "urgent" cases, they could've been avoided with better planning or better processes that ensure code quality.